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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25929100">Layers of The Earth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothersilentwriter/pseuds/anothersilentwriter'>anothersilentwriter</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Two Sides of The Sea [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>A short fic where I sort of poetically break down parts of Toph's character, Badass Toph Beifong, Featuring Iroh of course, Gen, My writing style is wierd, This is all about Toph, This is apart of the Two Sides of The Sea collection, emotional toph, layers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:48:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>953</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25929100</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothersilentwriter/pseuds/anothersilentwriter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Toph has always been a difficult person to understand.<br/>She has layers that she slowly reveals, as she cracks and breaks like the very earth she bends.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Two Sides of The Sea [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1737169</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Layers of The Earth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Layer One (Toph Beifong)</strong>
</p><p>On the very top- the dust that she brushed on top to hide who she really was- she used to be a helpless little blind girl.</p><p>Light and soft dresses.</p><p>Voices rarely above a whisper.</p><p>Barely able to move a rock.</p><p>She doesn’t speak, she rarely says anything. She normally nods or shakes her head. Her hand must be held as delicately as one must hold a winter rose. She’s just like dust really, you mustn’t dust her and dirty one’s self, you just sweep her away and out of sight.</p><p> </p><p>She sits at the dinner table as her parents talk behind her back in the other room. “She must never train above the basics, must never do anything that could hurt her. She is my little girl.”</p><p>They talk quietly.</p><p>Sometimes it sounds like they are just breathing. Everything about her parents is small, despite their wealth. They speak in small sentences, talk in small voices, they make sure Toph stays small.</p><p>She doesn’t say anything.</p><p>She doesn’t move.</p><p>She is nothing but dust, barely there, and rarely seen.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Layer Two (Blind Bandit)</strong>
</p><p>This is the layer that Toph keeps from her parents, the version of her that makes her who she is.</p><p>This is rock, pure rock and stone. The largest of all layers.</p><p>Belt buckles and trophies.</p><p>Smirks and Taunts.</p><p>She moves her feet with certain movements, uses her insults as a weapon. A slash with a hand sends grown men to the ground, a stomp of her foot sends one flying in the air past where her senses can’t reach.</p><p>She sneaks out and makes grand entrances.</p><p>Cussing and cursing with a vocabulary larger than her parents could ever have anticipated.</p><p>A winner and a fighter.</p><p> </p><p>“You seem like a tough kid.” The Arena Master has a deep voice, she isn’t used to deep voices. Or his accent. He talks like he doesn’t care what others think, there is no upperclass prissiness to it. No lies, no babying, nothing is hidden.</p><p>She finds her voice, and to her surprise it sounds different than it was with her parents. She sounds strong. “That because I am.”</p><p>She enters the Earth Rumble.</p><p>She hears the crowd for the first time.</p><p>
  <em>Loud.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Sweeping. </em>
</p><p><em>Coming from all directions</em>.</p><p>She is winning.</p><p> </p><p>The next time she sneaks out and shows up, the crowd screams for the Blind Bandit.</p><p>She likes it here.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Layer Three</strong>
</p><p>She wants to say that this is metal.</p><p>That this layer is the War Hero.</p><p>Twisted iron and bent steel.</p><p>Training the Avatar and defeating soldiers.</p><p><em>Doing the impossible</em>.</p><p>She takes down warships, and she uses her senses to her advantage. She trains the Avatar. She breaks boundaries and does everything she wanted to do. There are no insults, or taunts, this is pure instinct and skill.</p><p>She metalbends, she sandbends, she does it all.</p><p>Her weakness was never a weakness.</p><p>She is only strength.</p><p> </p><p>There are screams in the distance.</p><p>Screams of soldiers.</p><p>Screams of men.</p><p>She hates heights, but she has never felt stronger than when she was destroying warships. The metal bends at her command, and nothing she thinks, nothing can stop her. She is the only person in the world who can do this.</p><p>She breaks the door for Sokka, wrapping the metal around her into armor. She can feel the heartbeats of every person on the ship, she knows exactly what moves they will make before they make it.</p><p>
  <em>She is power. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>She is the greatest Earthbender in the world.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>This is glass. </strong>
</p><p>This is not a layer, or maybe it is.</p><p>But this is glass.</p><p>This is the cracks from the blows.</p><p>The lost of childhood, or maybe, the fact that this was her childhood.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This is the feeling when Aang died.</p><p>
  <em>Anger at losing her friend, pure hatred, and grief. Not knowing what will happen next. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>This is waking up in the middle of the night screaming, not feeling the earth beneath her.</p><p>
  <em>She remembers only having fingertips to grip onto. No earth, no metal. She couldn’t feel. </em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This is remembering the screams.</p><p>
  <em>Her screams, the enemies screams, the screams of children, of adults, the screams of man. Noise, it is one of the only things she has, but she has never heard a more horrible sound. </em>
</p><p>
  
</p><p>This is crying.</p><p>
  <em>Crying in the middle of the night. Waking up Katara, and then asking for Sokka, and then needing Aang, and then hugging Zuko, and even asking for a hand on her shoulder from Suki. Because they all know the feeling, they all know the loneliness and the pain of war. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>This crying. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>She is not glass.</p><p>But she has cracks, and she has been broken.</p><p>She has been hurt and been bruised.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Sometimes, you break,” Iroh explains to her over a cup of tea. “Sometimes you break, and you cry, and you struggle, and you end up doing things you never wanted to do.”</p><p>“What do you do when you break?” She asks.</p><p>“You heal, with time and with persistence.”</p><p>“Is it hard to heal?”</p><p>“Yes, it is.”</p><p>“Does that make me weak, Gramps?” She feels the waver in her voice. “If I need to heal.”</p><p>“Just because parts of you are broken, does not mean you are not strong. Canyons wield cracks, and fractures and yet they stand for thousands of years. Canyons, such as people have layers and that is something, I urge you to remember young Master Toph.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Toph Beifong is strong.</p><p>She is broken in some places.</p><p>She has been shattered.</p><p>She has been bent.</p><p>But she is strong.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Her voice is a small whisper, “I am strong like the earth.”</p><p>
  <em>“You are even stronger.” </em>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So I have not updated Fight For the Firelady, nope been ignoring that quite honestly. School starts on Monday, so I might need to put it on a hiatus for now (sorry). But I did find this draft in my files, and decided to edit it a bit. I think I promised this early in the year, but now I finished it and now it is here. </p><p>Yes, I made Toph emotional.<br/>Yes, this is different from the character on screen.<br/>Yes, it could be considered out of character.<br/>Yes, my writing style is weird but you still read whatever the heck this is.</p><p>But I think it is important to recognize trauma, and the emotional aspects of characters. It is not weak to be emotional, and it is important (in my opinion) to portray this in characters, especially strong ones. Please share your opinions and feedback!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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